Well to understand why Kabal did what he did so well, there's a few things to understand about the MK9 system:
- Wakeups had invincibility frames: regular had 11, EX wakeups had 20, (so if you had an advantageous restand, it was a massive deal in MK9)
- Armor was based on startup to first active frame rather than how many hits it could take
- Only designated specials were true wakeups, Kabal had 3 different true wakeups between nomad dash, low buzzsaw and overhead tornado slam
- There was no penalty other than your meter for using a breaker
- Using a breaker in the air actually put you at massive frame advantage
- Air projectile recovery properties were not hard coded and were the same at all times.
- Blockstrings did not jail into highs.
- Hitbox collision issues were waaaaay wonkier
So imagine if in MKX, Liu Kang could use a breaker, was the only character who could run, and run cancel without a stamina penalty, Dragon Kick to the other side of the screen after a breaker if wanted to, had the same recovery on his air fireball that he's granted mid combo, had a disjointed hurtbox on his low fireball etc. That's pretty much Kabal.
Granted, some people were definitely misinformed about some things that made him seem better than he actually was, mostly because MK9's training mode was complete dildos and you could barely explore anything with it. For example, the whole "full screen armored launcher" people say wasn't actually a thing, the armor on EX nomad dash wore off before he even entered travelling frames. It was only really on wakeup that EX nomad dash became a whole different pile of shit due to the invincibility system.
Not really. He did try to poke out and got full combo'd.
It's easy in hindsight to say " oh, you can poke out at that part you were able to poke out of"
The issue is knowing what that 'part' is.
F32 NDC was plus 2 and REO followed up with another F3 (a 13 frame normal), I'm pretty sure it was just a botched counterpoke.
